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criado em: 14:41 2023-01-24

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• palavras-chave: #formalismorusso #literatura #geo #filosofia #disserte #dostoievski #episteme #leitura
• notas:
• Dostoiévski, Fiodor

Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War

How to reckon with the ideology of “Anna Karenina,” “Eugene Onegin,” and other beloved books.
Elif Batuman
FONTE

As the visiting author of two books called “The Possessed” and “The Idiot,” I got to hear a certain amount about people’s opinions of Dostoyevsky. It was explained to me that nobody in Ukraine wanted to think about Dostoyevsky at the moment, because his novels contained the same expansionist rhetoric as was used in propaganda justifying Russian military aggression. My immediate reaction to this idea was to bracket it off as an understandable by-product of war—as not “objective.”

Elif Batuman é autora de romances além deste artigo.

But wasn’t that why we didn’t admire Dostoyevsky for his political commentary? The thing he was good at was novels. Anyone in a Dostoyevsky novel who went on an unreadable rant was bound to be contradicted, in a matter of pages, by another ranting character holding the opposite view: a technique known as dialogism, which features prominently both in Russian novels and in my own thinking. In the months following my trip, I often heard the Ukrainian critique of Dostoyevsky replaying in my mind, getting in arguments with past me, and resonating with other reservations I’d had, in recent years, about the role of Russian novels in my life.

Então existe um nome para aquilo que ele faz? Dialogismo

These questions took on a sickening salience late last February, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Once I was on the lookout, it wasn’t hard to spot Russian literature in the discourse surrounding the war—particularly in Vladimir Putin’s repeated invocations of the “Russian World” (“Russkiy Mir”), a concept popularized by Kremlin-linked “philosophers” since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian World imagines a transnational Russian civilization, one extending even beyond the “triune Russian nation” of “Great Russia” (Russia), “Little Russia” (Ukraine), and “White Russia” (Belarus); it is united by Eastern Orthodoxy, by the Russian language, by the “culture” of Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky—and, when necessary, by air strikes.

A ideologia por trás da dominação

O inimigo é Putin, não Pushkin — PEN INTERNATIONAL

(…) During the war, generations of Russian literary youths—among them, Pushkin and Tolstoy—went to the region. They wrote about their experiences, forming what came to be known as the Russian literature of the Caucasus: works I had been hugely excited to learn about in college, because they often included Turkic words. As the nineteenth century progressed, Georgian literary youths began to study in St. Petersburg, read Pushkin, and adopt Russian Romantic rhetoric to describe Georgian national identity.

A relação de Georgia com a história russa no contexto da pesquisa da autora. Muito bem articulado e cheio de dialogismo.

!Na ucrania, dostoievsky e pushkin estão cancelados#^a20fe1

(…) I fell in love with “Anna Karenina” because of how clearly it showed that no character was wrong—that even the unreasonable-seeming people were doing what appeared right to them, based on their own knowledge and experiences. As a result of everyone’s having different knowledge and experiences, they disagreed, and caused each other unhappiness. And yet, all the conflicting voices and perspectives, instead of creating a chaos of non-meaning, somehow worked together to generate more meaning.

Tolstói em sua melhor forma. A literatura russa em sua melhor forma.

I thought back to “Anna Karenina” and “Eugene Onegin.” How clearly Tolstoy and Pushkin had shown that, by falling in love with men, Anna and Tatiana foreclosed their already direly limited life choices! And yet, that ruinous, self-negating love was made to seem inescapable and glamorous. Anna dies, but looking fantastic, and thinking insightful thoughts up to the moment of her death. Tatiana’s love letter to Eugene Onegin causes nothing but heartache—but what a great letter! Had such novels encouraged me to view women’s suffering over men as an irreducible, even desirable part of the human experience—as something to be impartially appreciated, rather than challenged?

Uma leitura interessante do papel das mulheres na literatura russa. Citação de um ensaio de 1980 de Adrienne Rich: “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbianism”.

==It made me think: if the books I loved so objectively were actually vehicles of patriarchal ideology, why wouldn’t the ideology of expansionism be in there, too? ==Was that something I could see better from Tbilisi?

A autora usa brilhantemente da dialética nesse artigo. E a pergunta é muito certeira. Expansionismo não é muito diferente de machismo ou de patriarcalismo.

!patriarcado na lit russa#^db01bb

!Estadia na mansão mal assombrada dos esceritores em Geórgia#^8fce0c

Historical phenomena—revolution, modernity—are often said to start at a center, and then to spread to the peripheries. But that hierarchy or chronology—center first, periphery second—can be misleading. Technically, capitalism wasn’t born in a self-sufficient Western Europe and then transmitted to the rest of the world. It was, from the beginning, enabled by the wealth streaming into Western Europe from non-European colonies. The peripheries were always already playing a central role.

A origem geográfica e hierarquica da revolução — e como fenômenos históricos podem ser enganosos.

Edward W. Said e Denise Bottmann — NOTAS DE LEITURA/KINDLE HIGHLIGHTS/Cultura e imperialismo

==As Said points out, novels became a dominant literary form in eighteenth-century Britain and France, precisely when Britain was becoming the biggest empire in world history and France was a rival. Novels and empires grew symbiotically, defining and sustaining each other. “Robinson Crusoe,” one of the first British novels, is about an English castaway who learns to exploit the natural and human resources of a non-European island. ==In an influential reading of “Mansfield Park,” Said zooms in on a few references to a second, Antiguan property—implicitly, a sugar plantation—belonging to Mansfield’s proprietor. The point isn’t just that life in the English countryside is underwritten by slave labor, but that the novel’s plot itself mirrors the colonial enterprise. Fanny Price, an outsider at Mansfield, undergoes a series of harrowing social trials, and marries the baronet’s son. A rational subject comes to a scary new place—one already inhabited by other, unreasonable people—and becomes its rightful occupant. What does a story like that tell you about how the world works?

Julián Fuks fala sobre romance e especificamente sobre Robison crusoe em seu livro Teoria do romance — ali ele dirá que os romances de ficção não queriam, não se permitiam, dizer-se trabalhos de ficção.

Unlike Tatiana, Anna doesn’t remain faithful to her empire-building husband. She leaves Karenin for Vronsky, who turns down a prestigious military post in Tashkent in order to travel with her to Italy. But the Imperial Army gets Vronsky back in the end. That final image of Anna’s lifeless head is actually a flashback Vronsky has, on his way to join a Pan-Slavic volunteer detachment fighting the Ottomans in Serbia. With Anna dead, and the love plot over, his only desire is to end his own life, and to kill as many Turks as possible in the process. To quote a recent think piece titled “Decolonizing the Mysterious Soul of the Great Russian Novel,” by Liubov Terekhova—a Ukrainian critic who was reassessing “Anna Karenina” from the United Arab Emirates, as Russia bombed her home city, Kyiv—“Russia is always waging a war where a man can flee in search of death.”

A Rússia está sempre travando uma guerra onde um homem pode fugir em busca da morte.
!cultura e imperialismo do SAID conta também a rússia#^179339

Literature, in short, looks different depending on where you read it: a subject I found myself discussing one afternoon over lunch, in a garden overlooking Tbilisi, with Anna Kats, a Georgian-born, Russian-speaking scholar of socialist architecture, who immigrated to Los Angeles as a child. We talked about the essay “Can the Post-Soviet Think?,” by Madina Tlostanova, an Uzbek-Circassian proponent of “decoloniality,” a theory that originated in Latin America around the turn of the millennium. A key tenet is that “thinking” is never placeless or disembodied. The first principle of thought isn’t, as Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” but “I am where I think.”

I remembered the first time I read Pushkin’s travelogue “Journey to Arzrum,” the summer I turned twenty—during my own initial foray into travel writing, for a student guidebook. I had requested an assignment in Russia, but my Russian wasn’t good enough, so I was sent to Turkey. To improve my Russian, I was reading Pushkin on night buses, feeling excited every time I saw Erzurum (Pushkin’s Arzrum) on the schedule board at intercity stations.

Turkey hadn’t been Pushkin’s first-choice destination, either—he had wanted to go to Paris. Denied official permission, he resolved to leave the country the only way he could think of—by accompanying the military in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29. The tone of the resulting travelogue fluctuates unsettlingly between chatty verbiage and dispassionate horror. “The Circassians hate us,” Pushkin writes at one point. “We have forced them out of their open grazing lands; their auls”—villages—“have been devastated, whole tribes have been wiped out.” Nine years after his first visit to the Caucasus, Pushkin seems to have gained some clarity on the Circassians’ plight. (In 2011, the Georgian parliament voted to characterize Russia’s actions there as a genocide.) Still, in the next sentence, he goes on to observe, implausibly, that Circassian babies wield sabres before they can talk. Later in his account, Pushkin describes a lunch with troops during which they see, on a facing mountainside, the Ottoman Army retreating from Russian Cossack reinforcements—leaving behind a “decapitated and truncated” Cossack corpse. Pushkin quickly segues to the congeniality of camp life: “At dinner we washed down Asiatic shashlik with English beer and champagne chilled in the snows of Taurida.”

What can we afford to see, as writers and as readers? Could Pushkin afford to see that he benefitted from the “resettlement” of the Circassians? How clearly could he see it? For how long at a time?

After lunch, Kats and I took a funicular to the top of Mt. Mtatsminda, where she maintained that Tbilisi’s best custard-filled doughnuts were to be found. Rising above the treetops, thinking back on my own national and global privileges, the extent of which have grown clearer to me with the passing years, I did not, I decided, find it difficult to understand Pushkin’s simultaneous ability and inability to perceive the truth.

a literatura russa e os efeitos do imperialismo

In Tbilisi, I remembered a line from Oksana Zabuzhko’s classic 1996 novel, “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex,” which I read on my 2019 trip to Kyiv. “Even if you did, by some miracle, produce something in this language ‘knocking out Goethe’s Faust,’ ” Zabuzhko writes, of Ukrainian, “it would only lie around the libraries unread.” Her narrator, an unnamed Ukrainian-language poet visiting Harvard, suffers countless indignities. She’s broke, and her work is rarely translated. But she refuses to write in English or in Russian. A self-identified “nationalist-masochist,” she remains faithful to her forebears: poets who “hurled themselves like firelogs into the dying embers of the Ukrainian with nothing to fucking show for it but mangled destinies and unread books.”

Essa é uma fala maravilhosa, e me remeteu àquela outra de que c podemos até ter um tipo Einstein nascendo no brasil, mas ele vai ter condições de crescer e ser um tipo Einstein? ou vai morrer como morreram as crianças ianomamis?

Conversely, can a “good” book be written without robust literary institutions? “Eugene Onegin” is clearly a product of Pushkin’s constant dialogue with the editors, friends, rivals, critics, and readers whose words surrounded him, even in exile. Nikolai Gogol, born in 1809 in Ukraine with Pushkin-scale talents, became a famous writer only after moving to St. Petersburg.

Me pergunto todos os dias se não sou eu uma semente boa em solo seco.

In Tbilisi, the Gogol story I kept coming back to was “The Nose”

Um livro curto e muito famoso do mais importante escritor da ucrânia e da russia. Ela vai relacionar a trama com o prórpio discurso do Putin. Assim como o nariz da história, a ucrânia encarava o ocidente.

!o mérito literário e o poder militar#^b72606

Dostoyevsky: we meet at last. I opened it to “Crime and Punishment,” the story of Raskolnikov, a poor student, who decides to murder an old pawnbroker to fund his education. Turning the yellowed pages, I noticed multiple mentions of Napoleon. I thought back on Raskolnikov’s theory about how “extraordinary” individuals have the right to kill others for “the fulfillment of an idea.” If Napoleon, who murdered thousands of Egyptian people and stole their archeological treasures, is lauded as the founder of Egyptology, why shouldn’t a student be able to kill one person to advance his studies? The logic of Raskolnikov’s crime, I realized, was the logic of imperialism.

A autora começa a analisar o personagem e as ideias do protagonista de NOTAS DE LEITURA/LIVROS/Crime E Castigo — e lembra de como dostoievski foi chamado de imperialista pr um polonês que viveu com ele na sibéria — e como ainda assim as ideias de Raskolnikov não são necessariamente as do autor — apenas um motivo, uma deixa.

(…) In “Culture and Imperialism,” Edward Said raises a similar question about Jane Austen. He concludes that to “jettison” “Mansfield Park” is to miss an opportunity to see literature as a dynamic network, rather than as the isolated experiences of victims and perpetrators—but that the solution isn’t to keep consuming Austen’s novels in a geopolitical vacuum. Instead, we need to find new, “contrapuntal” ways of reading. (…) Contrapuntal, or stereoscopic, reading felt like an exciting approach to the Russian canon, in which categories like victim and perpetrator—or center and periphery—are particularly fluid.

Leitura contrapontual e leitura estereoscópica são duas abordagens chave da autora para lidar com as questões de imperialismo e da literatura russa ne imbróglio.

A contrapuntal approach would mean thinking about Russian classics alongside works by Zabuzhko and Tlostanova—and Dato Turashvili, Nana Ekvtimishvili, Nino Haratischwili, Taras Shevchenko, Andrey Kurkov, Yevgenia Belorusets, and Serhiy Zhadan, to name a handful of the important Georgian and Ukrainian writers whose works exist in English.

Muitas referências além dos russo conhecidos. Mas importa ver a aplicação da abordagem contrapontual. Envolveria considerar obras de clássicos russos ao lado de obras de outros escritores de países vizinhos como Geórgia e Ucrânia, cujas obras também existem em inglês. Esta abordagem significaria não separar as visões políticas de um romancista de sua literatura, e dá um exemplo de Dostoevsky, que foi vítima da repressão sob o regime czarista, mas tinha visões opressivas em relação a outros países como Ucrânia e Polônia. Além disso, o texto menciona que é importante não se colocar entre parênteses as visões políticas de um escritor.

In 1880, near the end of his life, Dostoyevsky gave a famous speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in what is now Moscow’s Pushkin Square, extolling Pushkin as the most Russian and the most universal of writers.

Eu tenho esse discurso na íntegra em um livro chamado Antologia do pensamento crítico russo (1802-1901) — da ed. 34 — na página 405. Dostoiévsky chama seu surgimento de pofecia. E será utilizado por Putin para fins malévolos.

The point of drawing a connection between Dostoyevsky and Putin isn’t to “censure” Dostoyevsky but to understand the mechanics of trauma and repression. In his own life, Dostoyevsky didn’t always apply this insight—but, like all good novelists, he enabled his future readers to see further than he could at the time.

Aqui se faz notar que nem mesmo os criadores de uma obra são capazes de escapar de armadilhas sobre as quais escreveram — mas podem servir de avisos para os que vierem depois.

!não existe literatura em um vácuo geográfico#^52eea8

Multiplicity is built into the text: ten versions exist, none conclusive. Tolstoy kept the draft at hand until his death, in 1910. In an 1898 diary entry, Tolstoy mentions a certain “English toy”—it sounds stereoscopic—that “shows under a glass now one thing, now another.” Hadji Murat, he writes, must be represented in this fashion: as “a husband, a fanatic, etc.” It occurred to me to think of that “English toy” as the novel itself—a technology inherited by Tolstoy from Austen and Defoe, one that could reveal different truths from different points in space and time, perhaps even destabilizing the structures it once bolstered.

A autora volta mais uma vez ao livro póstumo de Tolstói, Lev, Khadji-Murát. Ela denota como esse romance era ele mesmo além de seu tempo — e isso está denotado também na resenha que a ed. 34 faz do livro: “uma obra-prima e que se mostra de uma atualidade impressionante”.

Finalmente:

!Khadji-Murát#^1b2a51